Yom Kippur

Yesterday, I was worried I was coming down with a cold, so I skipped out on my workout and ate Mexican food instead. It happens.

Today is Yom Kippur, the annual Jews-don't-eat day. It's certainly tough fasting all day, but it's important to me, probably more so than any Jewish tradition. I started to appreciate it 5 years ago, when I was Africa. I was in the middle of nowhere, and feeling homesick. I fasted, and was as cranky and hungry as the rest of my family, at the exact same time, thousands of miles away. New Jersey isn't so far, but it still helped.

Fasting is much easier when I'm working all day; it feels like cheating. I guess I'm missing out on the repenting meditation of the holiday, but I had my moments. Every time I was hungry, or thirsty, I thought about how I am kind of clearing myself out of last year's junk (and last night's huevos rancheros). It's like spring cleaning. Everything I did wrong (I'm sure there was something) is forgotten, or forgiven, and now I can start the year fresh. It's like starting a new school year. If only Yom Kippur were a year earlier.

Besides, I got so much more work done today because I avoided the staff room and didn't need time for lunch (or snacks) (or other snacks). Unfortunately, today was the day my classroom-mate decided to treat his best few students to McDonald's. In fact, I am almost done with next week's lesson planning. (It does help that today's lesson had to be split in two, pushing everything back one day.)

To finish off the post for today, I share with you an email I sent to my IL, in response to her feedback from today's lesson.

Thank you for the feedback. It was really helpful to have students explain how they calculated slope, so the class could hear it a different way. In Salaam, almost all kids knew slope from the start, so I had a student show how they did an ENTIRE problem, and the kids corrected mistakes, and then discussed why it had to be a certain way. I’m actually pretty confident in Salaam’s mastery of slope. This allowed me more time in the class to review the definitions of underwater landforms more, which helped the flow of the lesson when it came down to labeling the diagram. I also limited the “pens down” time, which also helped the flow. Also, C was a hand-raising rock star.

I am going to work on seating charts: In Imani [first class - faith], I need to split up D/S and T/C. In Salaam [second class - peace], I need to split up K/A and maybe D/K and P/F. Ganas [third class - passion] has been rearranged recently, but I will keep an extra eye out for chronic problems.

I have my list of students to call sitting on my table—I keep forgetting! Priorities to remember tomorrow:

1-use checklist

2- ENERGY in the morning

3-Check off answers during IP ( did during Do Now in Salaam, really helped! It was easy to point out what they need to look at again)

Thanks,

Robin

And the email response included exclamation points and excitement about seeing my class next time.